Racial Healing As Prevention for K-12 Educators, Parents, and Youth: Voices from Healing Illinois on Socioemotional Well-Being

Background and Purpose: Longstanding institutionalized racism and injustices have created stark disparities in our K-12 schools that are detrimental to the socioemotional well-being of today’s educators, parents, and youth. The COVID-19 pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection all underscore the need to promote antiracism action and foster a sense of collective humanity. Racial healing is the process of creating self-awareness, reflection, and active (un)learning of our internalized messages about our own race and others. Racial healing can be the first step towards fostering better socioemotional well-being among K-12 educators, parents, and youth especially those that identify as black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC). Racial healing can also promote individual agentic action towards seeking broader systemic school reforms. This study explores the promise of racial healing as a preventive approach to mitigate poor socioemotional well-being among students, parents, and educators.

Methods: Under our Healing Illinois project, we conducted 17 focus groups (n=88) involving students, parents, and educators between November 2020 to March 2021. Focus groups were organized by race: majority white, majority BIPOC, and a mix of white and BIPOC. To understand the implications for racial healing and socioemotional well-being, we invited participants to share their perspectives on race and the impacts of events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, BLM, the killing of George Floyd by police, 2020 Presidential Election and the Capitol Insurrection. The focus groups were transcribed and coded based on a codebook developed by the research team. The goal is to explore the relationship between racial identity and participants’ engagement in actions leading towards better socioemotional well-being. Multiple cycles of coding were conducted by five independent raters in which codes from earlier rounds were organized into more meaningful and parsimonious categories.

Results: For educators, a common theme was their struggles to manage racism in their classrooms (“we don’t talk about it every day... it hasn’t happened every day” and “we had a group of [students] that were very racist outwardly... and I was told to deal with it”). For parents, most struggled in communicating with their young (“[my children] are very introspective... on one hand “I’ll give you guys ice cream, and we can let this all go away, but they’re like no, let’s have a conversation”). For students, racial healing provided them with a sense of agency for social action (“ There's been, like, a huge spark in everyone just trying to educate themselves and like, bring awareness to everything and it's just really good to see how many people are just willing to hop on that.”)

Conclusions and Implications: Participants in our focus groups highlighted the promise of racial healing in the prevention of poor socioemotional well-being among educators, parents, and youth. Findings draw attention to the role of racial healing to promote individual agentic action towards broader systemic reforms. We conclude with a discussion on the issues and challenges of racial healing as a prevention approach towards fostering socioemotional well-being among educators, parents, and youths.